Friday, July 14, 2017

The Church of Modern Lunacy

I have a passing interest in the Church of England and its American
variation, the Episcopal Church. An old friend is in the church so I get
some first hand descriptions of what it is like to be in a dying
institution. That’s the only way to describe the Episcopal Church.
Attendance declines every year as old members die off and new members
never materialize. Go into an Episcopal service and you can’t help but
notice that most everyone is a senior. The actuarial tables are the
church’s greatest enemy.

Of course, church attendance has always skewed a little older. Young
people tend not to be attracted to the faith, even if their parents
regularly attend services. As people get older, have families and begin
to sink roots, they get more involved in their faith and attend services
regularly. That’s the trouble with the mainline Protestant religions.
The young are not coming back once they start having families. That
means their children are not raised in the faith. As a result, these
churches are now in a death spiral.

The story is familiar to anyone who has been paying attention. These
churches made the decision to chase the latest social fads in the 70’s
and 80’s, hoping to make themselves more appealing to the young. The
only thing they did was make themselves less attractive to people
interested in being part of a traditional Christian sect. It was not
just in the pews, but in the clergy as well. Those feeling the call
found that the church in which they were raised was not interested in
defending and maintaining the faith.

The result is the clergy slowly radicalized. First came the women and
then the feminist women. Soon they invited in the homosexuals and the
clergy started looking like the faculty of a liberal arts college.
That’s when the pews started to empty out. Why bother going to church,
when you can get the same liberal lecture from television? That’s what
started the decline in church attendance. Instead of offering a shelter
from the storm, they decided to chase an over-served market – radical
Progressives.

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